Fakhry Al-Serdawi: America’s Mideast Empire is not about White Guilt

By Fakhry Al-Serdawi: (He’s on a quest to Mordor to throw Saddam Hussain’s Golden AK-47 into the fires of Mount Doom)

The post-9/11 film The Kingdom was unique in the sense that it was both globalist and nationalist dad-porn. The 2007 film portrays a rapid deployment FBI team sent to investigate a terrorist attack in the Middle East. A typical Democrat would love the film because Jamie Foxx portrays the team leader. A feminist would like the film because it has Jennifer Garner as the strong female character, while wired Euro-liberals would adore the film because it has Palestinian-Israeli actors Ashraf Barhom and Ali Suliman (Arab-Israeli artists are true darlings of globalism) portraying “moderate” Saudi cops.

Don’t worry, the movie is also for small-town rural Americans, as it also stars your Little America’s favorite bartender, Chris Cooper, as a crucial member of the team. But more importantly, the terrorist attack in the story hits a true homesteader yeoman utopia: a housing compound of an American oil company. The attack even takes place during a baseball game, because of course it will take place during the game! And when the investigation team in the aftermath knocks on the door of one of those stick-it-to-the-man true Americans at the compound, he says, scolding the good Saudi cop:

“My 5-year-old boy, when I got home, had a box of Band-Aids, and he was trying to put his mama’s mouth back on. Is this what Mohammed the prophet… Is this what Allah wants? Does Allah love your kids more than he does mine? Does Allah love your wife more than he does mine? Leave me the fuck alone and do not come back to my house! I should have went home a long goddamn time ago!”

This is, of course, a single example of this epistemological nightmare on America’s presence in the Middle East, forever stuck in either complete empire-denialism by the Republicans or condemning the American empire as exclusively and mainly white by the Democrats’ academic arm post-2016, which leads even to more empire-denialism; America’s role is completely non-existent, positive, or innocent in the Middle East because Critical Race Theory is insane and Ibram X. Kendi is a grifter.

An example of this is Alex Hochuli, who, within five months of the Gaza War, brought up a critique of the leftist critique of Israel that he felt salient; the fact that Liberals find ease in critiquing Israel because of the supposed whiteness of that country makes it feel like you are criticizing your own American, British, and French governments. Another example of this is Pamela Nogales and Gabe Gottfried, who criticized an activist who voiced his opinion before a Platypus Panel about “our responsibility as US citizens to the Palestinians”, and framed what he said as a setback to the “conservative framework of nationalism.”

These positions conflate American Western, white, or national identity (and its many subidentities) with American citizenship, which is a universal and abstract relationship between the individual political subject and (big) government, which has nothing to do with identity, nationality, and race. The matter of fact is, people do not -or at least should not- criticize their own governments because they are white and the governments they are criticizing are also white; they do so because they are taxpayers and voters observing the actions of their own governments within a democratic parliamentary framework. Absolving the actions of governments as an overcorrection of the exaggerations of liberal anti-racism is, by itself, a resignation to whatever lowest common denominator liberals do set, while betraying libertarian values by letting the government get away with its overreach.

Conflating foreign policy with race and other issues has increased during and after the success of the Zohran Mamdani campaign. I am highly critical of the Democratic Party’s fetishization of Mamdani’s ethnic background and his own fetishized anti-capitalism, with his declared goal of taxing “richer and whiter” neighbourhoods. I have already told some of my friends that Mamdani is a symptom of a Party that is too cowardly to attack anti-communism, but it is too dogmatic in its war against racism, when it should actually be pragmatic about race and dogmatic about socialism.

Yet many people on both sides were happy to link Mamdani’s performative decolonization in New York with the critique of the actions of the federal government abroad. Matthew Schmitz in Compact Magazine, for example, indicates that Mamdani and his ilk’s support for the Palestinians can be explained by the Democratic Party becoming overtaken by a leadership of recent immigrants who do not care about the problems of Americans whose ancestors have been here for centuries, including African-Americans.

This opinion is flawed for three reasons: first, Tucker Carlson is not a POC immigrant leader of the Democratic Party without deep ancestry in America, and he happens to criticize Israel. Second, the conversation on the hardships of African-Americans never shifted within the Democratic Party because there was never an authentic conversation about the actual well-being of the black working class. Third, as Freddie DeBoer claims, “there are many different ways to commodify Black Culture,” Schmitz is not immune to that, offering to play the liberal role that Democrats did in the past decades, fetishizing African-Americans as a “voting-bloc”, a one that would not be pitted against the white working class this time, but against an actual non-voting bloc, which is immigrants.

This voting bloc group identity politics (another avoidance of socialist politics) is troublesome in and of itself, because it goes along with the new bi-partisan identitarian shift, entrusting the Democratic Party with immigrant issues while “borrowing” black issues to the Republican Party. But it is also problematic because it conflates the immigrant non-voting bloc with another non-voting bloc in US politics: Gazans. Those people have not transgressed US borders illegally (not yet, trust me on that one), but the American Culture War is treating them and deciding over their lives as such, because the US political middle-class has no real foreign policy plan for Gazans, but can only utilize them as mascots for the fake projects of “decolonization” or “saving Western Civilization”.

Once again, this goes back to the claim that the US Empire in the Middle East is “white” and the counterclaim that we should deny the empire charge as a whole to deny that whiteness as a crime (or to deny the Israeli whiteness to deny the existence of Empire). Both positions, left and right, insist on linking Empire with whiteness, when the fact is that the American Empire in the Middle East is not white; it is just Stalinist, and it is not about white shame, it is about Arab anti-communism.

Yes, the Palestinian struggle had to do before with the Afro-Asian struggles against old European Empires (when Israel, for example, conducted nuclear tests with Apartheid South Africa), but the American Empire in the Arab World is nothing like the British and the French Empires in Africa, for the simple fact that America in the Middle East works much similar to the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe, It is a shared Empire between American, Israeli, Turkish and Arab bureaucracies (wanting the Iranian bureaucracy to join, well, it can’t become more DEI than that!). This alliance of the deep states shares the same geopolitical ideology of anti-communism, which has continued after the Cold War into the War on Terror while building up a massive political economy for fighting or containing any possible counter-hegemony from a rogue state like Iran to civil-society uprisings like in 2011.

There are too many kinds of anti-communism(s) in the Middle East to the extent that in the absence of communism, they become in a constant civil war with each other, a one that America can bureaucratize, monetize, and manage. The irony here is when this non-racial Empire becomes the very thing that killed the American Revolution of 1776, and the reaffirmation of its universality in 1865. It is absolutely stupid to cite this Middle Eastern imperial adventure as white colonialism, and it is absolutely redundant for J.D Vance to act like all this does not exist at a TPUSA event because he feels white people have nothing to apologize for.